In the United States a standard has been proposed for digitally encoded high definition television signals. This standard is essentially the same as the MPEG-2 standard, proposed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of the International Standards Organization (ISO). This standard is described in a draft internal standard (DIS) publication entitled "Information Technology--Generic Coding of Moving Pictures and Associated Audio, Recommendation H.626" ISO/IEC 13818-2 DIS, 3/94 which is available from the ISO and which is hereby incorporated by reference for its teaching on the MPEG-2 digital video encoding standard.
The MPEG-2 standard is actually several different standards. In MPEG-2 several different profiles are defined, each corresponding to a different level of complexity of the encoded image. For each profile, different levels are defined, each level corresponding to a different image resolution. One of the MPEG-2 "standards" known as Main Profile, Main Level is intended for encoding video signals conforming to existing television standards (i.e., NTSC and PAL). Another "standard", known as Main Profile, High Level is intended for encoding high-definition television images. Images encoded according to the Main Profile, High Level standard may have as many as 1,152 active lines per image frame and 1,920 pixels per line.
The Main Profile, Main Level standard, on the other hand, defines a maximum picture size of 768 pixels per line and 567 lines per frame. At a frame rate of 30 frames per second, signals encoded according to this standard have a data rate of 13,063,680 pixels per second. By contrast, images encoded according to the Main Profile, High Level standard have a maximum data rate of 1,152 * 1,920 * 30 or 66,355,200 pixels per second. This data rate is more than five times the data rate of image data encoded according to the Main Profile Main Level standard. The standard proposed for HDTV encoding in the United States is a subset of this standard, having as many as 1,080 lines per frame, 1,920 pixels per line and a maximum frame rate, for this frame size, of 30 frames per second. The maximum data rate for this proposed standard is still far greater than the maximum data rate for the Main Profile, Main Level standard.
Because of this difference in data rates, it is unlikely that the equipment used to decode Main Profile Main Level encoded data will be sufficient to decode high-definition television signals that have been encoded according to the Main Profile, High Level standard.
To be optimally effective, the coding systems should be relatively inexpensive and yet have sufficient power to decode these digital signals in real time.
The MPEG-2 standard defines a complex syntax which contains a mixture of data and control information. Some of this control information is used to enable the signals having several different formats to be covered by the standard. These formats define images, having differing numbers of picture elements (pixels) per line, differing numbers of lines per frame or field and differing numbers of frames or fields per second, In addition, the basic syntax of the MPEG-2 Main Profile defines the compressed MPEG-2 bit stream representing a sequence of images in six layers, the sequence layer, the group pictures layer, the picture layer, the slice layer, the macro block layer, and the block layer. Each of these layers is introduced with control information. Finally, other control information, also known as side information, (e.g. frame type, macroblock pattern, image motion vectors, coefficient zig-zag patterns and dequantization information) are interspersed throughout the coded bit stream.
To effectively receive the digital images, a decoder must recognize the control portions, extract the necessary control information, and use the extracted data to process the video signal information.
Using existing techniques, a decoder may be implemented using a single processor having a complex design and operating at a high data rate to perform this function. While the speed of the processor could be reduced by segmenting the data and processing it in parallel, any reduction in speed would be off-set by an increase in the complexity of the individual processors needed for the parallel channels. This increase in complexity would result from the need to synchronize the various parallel channels.